Veteran actor Leslie Jordan on Hollywood homophobia, alcoholism and late-blossoming fame

What do Dolly Parton, Lady Gaga and 5.7m followers on Instagram all have in common? Each loves the pint-sized phenomenon that is Leslie Jordan. The 65 year old, 4ft 11in actor, hailing from Chattanooga, Tennessee, was already an industry darling before Covid-19 hit, but his Instagram videos, filmed in lockdown, have turned him into a proper star.

“I’ve always had a little bit of fame,” he says, calling from his home in West Hollywood, which he moved to as an aspiring actor in 1982. “I could walk around places and they’d go: Oh! We love [‘lurve’] you from Will and Grace! Oh! We love you in American Horror Story! But now, I swear it’s like Lady Gaga. I can’t get down the street!”

It is hard to do justice to Jordan’s joyous Southern tones in print - just remember that every “ing” is an “in’”, and every “I” is an “Ah”. The sentences don’t so much lilt as capsize. The accent, the size, the spry face, have been his signature whether as a gruff editor in The Help, a victim of Gaga’s in American Horror Story (we’ll come to that later), or of course Beverley Leslie, Karen Walker’s nemesis in Will & Grace, with whom he was forever trading barbs (“Oh,” she calls him one time, “the world’s oldest girl!”).

But when, last spring, he started posting videos on his Instagram account, things really kicked off. Killing time in Chattanooga, where he had gone to be near his elderly mother and younger twin sisters, his tangential one-minute monologues made him a lockdown delight. “Well hello, fellow hunker-downers,” is a standard opener, followed by reminiscences about favourite roles, life questions or dancing to Britney Spears. The result is that he now has a book coming out, a new TV show and an album, even if he himself knows he’s not the world’s greatest singer (“The Rolling Stone said I had a ‘capable voice’”, he cackles). Called Company’s Comin’, it is a collection of the Southern Baptist hymns Jordan used to sing as a child, accompanied by country royalty like Chris Stapleton, Brandi Carlile and yes, Dolly.

“I don’t think it gets any better right now to be Leslie Jordan,” he beams. “Everything I’ve ever worked for, for the last 30, 40 years is coming to fruition.”

Jordan says the reasons for his Instagram success are pretty simple. “I thought, ‘I’m not gonna go near religion or politics, and I’m not gonna try to sell anything. I’m just gonna try to be funny, y’know? I just said what everybody was thinking. I’d go: y’all, I’m so bored! What we gonna’ do? And people really took to it. Because I just spoke it like it was, I guess.”

It was on the platform that he first started sharing videos of him singing the hymns, accompanied by the dashing young actor and singer Travis Howard. The whole thing soon snowballed into recording an album, with Dolly, who he met last year in Nashville, as the piece de resistance. But they had previous. Back in the 70s, when Jordan was still in high school, he drove all the way from Chattanooga to Pigeon Forge, where Parton is from, since she was doing a homecoming gig at the local high school auditorium, to celebrate her big new hit ‘Jolene’. He has also appeared as her in drag, in the cult queer movie, Sordid Lives, “stuffed with these big rubber t-----!” And apparently she doesn’t disappoint in real life.

“People say, ‘what’s she like?’ Well, honey, you know what she’s like – what you see is what you get. She’s smart.” (Yes, he has taken ‘her’ vaccine.) “The thing that really blew me away was how tiny she is. Oh my God – she’s MY height! Tiny, teeny!” Oh, and “she’s got the CUTEST little butt…”

Naturally I also wonder if Company’s Comin’ is an embracing of Jordan’s Southern Baptist past, or an exorcism. Jordan thinks he got baptised “14 times” as a youngster, in a bid to fight his demons. (“The preacher would say, ‘I believe I already baptised you this summer’, and I’d say: ‘I don’t think it took’.”) Indeed if Jordan says “I have no axe to grind with the religion that I was raised in”, still, his obvious outsiderness was there – “it was so difficult growing up,” he sighs. His father, a lieutenant colonel in the Army, died in a plane crash when he was 11; as for his mother, “she did the best with the light she had to see with,” he says kindly. At first, she told him he should try to live quietly. “So... here I am! Haha!”

It strikes me that Jordan seems remarkably thick-skinned. “If you’re in any way self-conscious, don’t go into comedy, honey,” he chuckles. “I’ve never been bothered about my size. The only thing that bothered me growing up was my voice – I felt like I opened my mouth and 50 yards of purple chiffon came flyin’ out! But then, I’ve made a million dollars on it – know what I mean?”

Last weekend Kate Winslet commented that several actors in Hollywood were still, in 2021, scared of coming out. This won’t be news to Jordan, whose first steps in showbiz in the 1980s were cloaked in euphemism (he made a killing in commercials at first, before starting to get good jobs in the 1990s; he first appeared in Will & Grace in 2001).

“They never said ‘gay’ back then,” he says of casting directors. “They said, ‘we need a Mama’s boy, someone a bit ‘nancy’”. He’s chuckling but I wonder how it felt. “Well, what could you do back then?” His directors – “who of course, were gay too” – were always telling him to not act too effeminate. “‘Darling, keep your feet on the ground and your hands by your side’. ‘Put your voice in your lower register, Mary!’” Most of the studios had gay bosses too, he says, but it was all “wink wink” – you’d just see them after-hours in bars. He says he’s amazed by the progress in the last four decades. “I never thought we’d be here,” he says.

The clearest mark of Jordan’s own struggle – and resilience – is his conquering of substance abuse: he has now been sober for some 22 years. If his family were teetotallers, he started drinking cocktails one night aged 14 with a girl from the one Episcopalian family down the road, and he passed out on the kitchen floor. It was an inauspicious debut. “I think a lot of gay people started drinking because it was just easier to be gay when we were drinking.” He was an awkward, effeminate boy, but alcohol solved all this, made him feel “precious” – until he reached a nadir in his early 40s.

“There were all kinds of arrests,” he sighs. “I’ve been to jail three times. I just couldn’t seem to stay out of trouble. I mean, the judge is the one who said to me: ‘You need to put the plug in the jug, Mister Jordan’. Anyway, it all worked out beautifully, because I’ve been completely clean and sober and I’m in a recovery programme.” If he’d had this all this new success while still drinking, “I’d mess every bit of it up, somehow”. Right. And you wouldn’t be getting sexually manhandled by Lady Gaga? He honks. “I wouldn’t have had her straddle me, and holler at the moon…!”

Ah yes, Gaga. The two were filming in Ryan Murphy’s legendarily camp series American Horror Story, and had a fantastical scene where she was supposed to jump out on him and blow fairy dust in his eyes. Really, it’s hard to explain, and the preparations for it sound just as mad.

“She took me out into the woods, and said: ‘Listen, I don’t want to sexualise this character, and I tend to, and I’m not sure what I need to do’, and then she went into a reverie which I wasn’t privy to – she just stood there. Finally, I could tell she made a decision… but she didn’t say what. So by the time the director said ‘action’, I STILL didn’t know what was goin’ on! She was rubbing, you know, her hoo-ha, and hollerin’ at the moon, and shaking her hair, and I remember just lying there thinking: how do I GET into these situations?”

Recently meanwhile Jordan took to Instagram to post a message of support for the Duchess of Sussex, or “Miss Markle”, in the wake of *that* interview. He says that Harry “seems like a dear boy”, but what I really love is that he adds, “I’ve always liked Princess Anne, because she’s such a horsewoman”. A lesser-known fact about Jordan is that he spent his early twenties trying to be a jockey, before finally quitting and heading to LA at the grand old age of 27 – so no wonder he loves the Princess Royal. He also loves how “acerbic” she is, he coos. “You can just tell… she barely speaks, but you look at her face, and she tells it all!”

Could Jordan have ever made it as a jockey, or was showbiz always his destiny? He both sidesteps and answers me at the same time.

“I don’t think I ever could have actually, only because of the weight. People think it’s size, or something – it has nothing to do with that. You have to weigh about 104 pounds, and honey, my ass alone weighs 104!” Another asset, I tease him. “Yes! Seldom used, but…” Hasn’t he earned the last laugh?

Company's Comin' is out now on Platoon